Moses: Learning To Trust The God Who Leads - Part 7
Numbers 12:1-16
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
We are in our Moses series. Last week, you heard from our guest speaker, Pastor Wayne, and he talked about Moses being up on the mountaintop, what that experience was for him, and how it can apply to our own lives. But today we’re going to go back into the valley and talk about what Moses experienced: some lows, some opposition. We’re going to talk about what we do, or what we can do, when we are faced with conflict.
We’re going to be in the book of Numbers. I don’t think I’ve ever preached out of the book of Numbers, so that’s going to be fun. But we’re going to be in Numbers 12. It’ll be on the screen, but you can turn there in your Bibles, or there are Bibles under your chair if you don’t have yours. We’re just going to read the whole chapter together, and then we’ll get into it and break it down. So join me in Numbers chapter 12.
Starting in verse 1: Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife. Miriam and Aaron were Moses’ sister and brother, for he had married a Cushite. They asked, “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Hasn’t he also spoken through us?” The Lord heard this. Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. At once the Lord said to Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, “Come out to the tent of meeting, all three of you.” So the three of them went out. Then the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud. He stood at the entrance to the tent and summoned Aaron and Miriam. When the two of them stepped forward, he said, “Listen to my words. When there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions. I speak to them in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my house. With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles. He sees the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” The anger of the Lord burned against them, and he left them. When the cloud lifted from above the tent, Miriam’s skin was leprous; it became as white as snow. Aaron turned toward her and saw that she had a defiling skin disease. He said to Moses, “Please, my lord, I ask you not to hold against us the sin we have so foolishly committed. Do not let her be like a stillborn infant, coming from its mother’s womb with no flesh.” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “Please, God, heal her.” The Lord replied to Moses, “If her father had spit in her face, would she not have been in disgrace for seven days? Confine her outside the camp for seven days. After that, she can be brought back.” So Miriam was confined outside the camp for seven days, and the people did not move on till she was brought back. After that, the people left Hazeroth and encamped in the desert of Paran.
Let’s pray. God, thank you for your word. Thank you for the power that it has, that it is alive and active. Speak to our hearts today. Give me your words to say. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
So this is kind of an odd story. It just comes in the middle of this series, but we can learn so much from it. Just to give us a little bit of context, Miriam and Aaron are Moses’ siblings, and they are traveling with him in the wilderness with all of the Israelites. They came to him, or were kind of coming to each other and creating this conflict, and said that it was because they had a problem with Moses marrying a Cushite.
We’re not entirely sure who this woman is. We know that Moses had married Zipporah, a Midianite. So there are some questions about whether this is referring to the same woman or if maybe Moses married again. But we do know that it had to do with her race, that both Midianites and Cushites had darker skin. So they were coming to Moses with this issue: it had to do with her race, and they had a problem with it. But the fact is that while they may have had a problem with it, that was not the real issue. That was what they said. That was not the real issue that they had.
The real issue was that they were feeling less important than Moses. They used his wife and her race to attack him as a way to come at him, but the real problem was that they were struggling with some self-esteem issues. They were feeling less than. They were feeling forgotten, underappreciated. And they wanted to bring it to his attention. Really, they lost sight of what God had called them to do and started focusing on what God had called Moses to do.
Now we can learn a lot from this chapter, whether it be Moses’ response. If we just take a look at Moses, he doesn’t have a lot of action in this passage. He has matured. If we go back to Egypt and remember how he acted when he killed the Egyptian, or when he tried to defend the Midianite daughters, we see that he took action. He wanted to go, he wanted to defend, he wanted to be the savior. So we see some of this maturity in Moses as he is quiet.
We can also learn about God’s character, and we’re going to talk about how He responds to this situation. But perhaps the most applicable thing for us is that we can see how best to handle conflict and opposition, especially when it comes to our calling or to the purpose that God has given us in our life. Here we have a man, Moses, who is just doing his best to follow God, to lead God’s people. But Miriam and Aaron were coming against him. They’ve been with Moses since the beginning, since they left Egypt. Aaron was there next to Moses, talking to Pharaoh, asking him to let God’s people go. They’ve served, they’ve led, they’ve been given responsibilities, but they didn’t feel equal. They didn’t feel appreciated for how they were serving.
Now, before we get into what God says about this, we see a note in verse 3. Many versions have it in parentheses, and it says, “Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.” Now this might be confusing for some of you who know that Moses wrote the book of Numbers. It is believed that Moses wrote the book of Numbers. You’re like, “How humble is he if he wrote how humble he was?” Well, scholars believe that this was actually a note that was added later, either by a scribe that was physically writing the Scriptures down or maybe even by Joshua, who was very close to Moses and would have known his character and made this note. But it really sets the stage for us to understand how humble Moses had become. And that really helps us to better understand this conflict.
It’s interesting to note, though, that the word “humble” or “humility” here is not the typical word used for humility or meekness. It actually conveys the idea of a person’s devout dependence upon the Lord. So this note is to help us understand that Moses was wildly dependent on God. He was so dependent on Him. He knew who God was, and he knew who he was, and that he was not God. And so he had this extreme dependence on God and humility before Him.
So the first thing we learn from Moses, as to how to deal with conflict when we face it, is to operate with humility. Yes, operate with humility as we understand it—as meekness or maybe thinking less of yourself—but also in the way the text describes it, as having a devout dependence on God. Obviously, we don’t only want to have humility just to make us look better, but it’s this idea of living humbly so that it would almost be ridiculous for someone to come at us with something. People would know us and our character so well, and we would operate from a place of humility and dependence on God so obviously that it would be hard for someone to believe a negative claim about us.
Now, this is not about accountability. There still needs to be accountability. We are human. We mess up. Moses messed up. He needed accountability as well. But we should be living in a way where our humility is so evident, our dependence on God is so evident, that when we do face conflict, it may be hard for a third party to even understand how that is happening because they know our character. So we can learn from Moses to operate with humility, dependence on God.
So now we are going to hear what God has to say about this conflict. So we’re going to pick up in verse 4. It says, “At once the Lord said to Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, ‘Come out to the tent of meeting, all three of you.’ So the three of them went out. Then the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud. He stood at the entrance to the tent and summoned Aaron and Miriam.” When I read this part of Scripture, all I can picture is the “dad face.” Come here. Moms have it too. Come here. Let’s talk. And by “let’s talk,” I mean I’m going to talk and you listen, right? That’s what I picture in the most loving, godly way, but that’s what I picture in the human version. He said, “Come here. Come out and come meet with me.”
In verse 5, it says, “When the two of them stepped forward, he said, ‘Listen to my words. When there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions. I speak to them in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my house. With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles. He sees the form of the Lord.’” We skip. I think we might have talked about this last week, but he literally saw the form of God. “Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses? The anger of the Lord burned against them, and he left them.” I would not want to be Aaron and Miriam in that situation.
In this section of the chapter, some versions have it just kind of built in. At least in my NIV, it has it separated so you can tell more clearly that God is speaking. This is actually more of a poetic proclamation from God, and it is written in a poetic way. Many scholars believe that it is written in a chiastic structure. I had to look it up, but it is like one line is A, one line is B, one line is C, D, E, and then it goes back. So they have parallel meanings that go along with it. And the one that’s in the middle, that would be like E in this case, is the main point. And for us, that would be verse 7.
So it says, “But this is not true of my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my house.” God’s whole point is saying, “He’s my servant, he is my confidant, he is different.” God is explicitly explaining to Aaron and Miriam, “Moses is set apart for a different purpose. You can have your feelings about this, Aaron and Miriam. You can feel things about this. You may disagree, but the fact is that he’s special. He is set apart. And that speaking against Moses in this case was as if they were speaking against God. And that was a big deal.” He had been chosen by God for a specific, intimate, purposeful relationship, for the purpose of leading the Israelites. And it wasn’t because Moses was special. It was because God is perfect, and He chose Moses and chose to use Him.
I think there might have been some family dynamics going on here, right? We can see that. There’s these siblings, there’s this tension, there’s this conflict. Like I said, we were in Kansas this last week with my side of the family. I’m the oldest of three, and so I have a younger brother and a younger sister. And we as a family, in general, have the spiritual gift of sarcasm. It’s just like a love language for us. We just speak in sarcasm. People could probably be offended by some of the things we say. We don’t mean it that way. But we speak in sarcasm a lot in our family.
My sister and I have this running joke that our brother is our mom’s favorite. And so anytime he does something, “Oh, okay, he’s mom’s favorite. She won’t care.” Or anytime she does something for him, “Oh well, he is mom’s favorite, of course she will.” And he rolls his eyes, and it’s just this running joke. But I think for Aaron and Miriam, there was some legitimacy to this. They were like, “Moses is God’s favorite.” And they were kind of not wrong. He had been set apart. But the family dynamics created this tension. They were so focused on what Moses had been called to that they couldn’t remember or see what God had called them to. And so they felt this inferiority, or this less-than-ness in their identity, in their purpose, in their self-esteem.
And honestly, they had been traveling together in the wilderness for about a year and a half at this point. You know, you’ve traveled with family before. You know how that can get. There’s some preferences that come out, there’s some annoyances that come out, and that’s when we have iPads, right? That’s when we have modern amenities. They’re in the wilderness walking, eating manna. There’s going to be some things that come up. Conflict will happen, but it’s how we deal with it. Regardless of the reasons or the excuses of why Miriam and Aaron created this conflict among themselves, Moses didn’t feed into it. He didn’t defend himself. God defended him.
So the next thing we learn from Moses is that when we face conflict, we let God fight our battles. We let Him be the one to fight our battles and defend us. Listen, this does not mean we never say anything. This does not mean we never set a boundary. Boundaries are fantastic. Please set boundaries. This does not mean that you let people railroad you. This does not mean you become a doormat. This just means sometimes you let God do all the talking, all the defending.
Moses wasn’t a doormat in this situation. Jesus was not a doormat. He went toe-to-toe with people. Sometimes He confronted them. Sometimes He responded to a question with a question. Sometimes He simply called them out. He called the Pharisees a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs. He wasn’t playing around. He was not a doormat, but He did it with love and truth. And ultimately, when it was time for Him to be crucified, He kept His mouth shut. And the Lord, God, Yahweh, defended Him with the ultimate response of resurrection.
But sometimes we say too much. We try to defend. We try to explain. And sometimes we just need to take a seat and let God do the fighting for us. There will be times when you face conflict with someone who can only see you as the villain of your story—the villain of their story. There is no reasoning with them. They will not understand your innocence. They will not believe that you are speaking truth. And that’s when we just have to understand, or be okay with, being misunderstood.
God sees us. He knows our hearts. He’s the one who will defend us. He will be our refuge and our strength. He will fight our battles. And hopefully we see justice this side of heaven, but we might not. But we know we will in heaven. We know in eternity there will be justice in the end.
Moses knew how to do this well because he had done it before. Back in Exodus chapter 14, when the Israelites were leaving Egypt, they were surrounded. They had the Egyptians and Pharaoh’s army coming on one side and the Red Sea on the other, and they were trapped and they were panicking. They didn’t know what to do. And Moses, it says in Exodus chapter 14, “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you. You need only to be still.”
There’s a time and a place to fight back, to stand for what’s right, to defend and fight for justice. And there’s a time to be still. There’s a time to be quiet. Now, this requires discernment. This requires listening to the Holy Spirit, knowing when it’s time to speak and when it’s time to sit down. That requires you to be tuned in to the voice of God to know when the right time is for those things.
But even if you are the one speaking, God is the one who fights your battles. Early this year, Chris and I were actually accused of owing a lot of money—several thousand dollars. We knew we were innocent. We knew we had done what we needed to do, and that this was a mess-up with paperwork. It wasn’t the right thing, but it was still really scary. And so we followed the process. We appealed the decision. We started seeking legal counsel. We did all the things that were in our power to do.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the thoughts weren’t spiraling, that we weren’t trying to think of how we could defend ourselves: what we would say to a lawyer, what we would say to a judge if we needed to, how we could convince them that we were in fact innocent—that we didn’t owe this money that we didn’t have. And we were just in a waiting period. We had done all we could, and we just had to wait. But the thoughts kept spiraling. We kept trying to think of our defense.
And one night, Chris got a call from the agency that was telling us we owed this money. And this whole time, we had been praying that God would allow a believer to see our case and go to bat for us. They knew we were pastors because of our occupation, our paperwork. So we just hoped that there would be some believer, and that our case would come across their desk.
And a woman called Chris and said, “I’m calling about your case.” And he said, “Oh, is it about the appeal?” She said, “No. But your case came across my desk, and something’s not right about it. And I felt like the Lord told me that I needed to call you and let you know it was going to be okay. I’m a believer. And the coworker who brought this case to my attention, she’s also a believer. And the supervisor we took it to, so that we could get it up the chain, he’s also a believer. We prayed for one, the Lord gave us three.”
And she said, “It’s not resolved yet. But I’m working on it. And we’re going to fix this. And I just needed, I just felt like I needed to call you and tell you it’s going to be okay. You don’t have to worry.” We never heard from Rosa again, but just over a week later, we got an email that the agency had no basis for charging us this money. Our debt was cleared, and our case was closed. We didn’t have to do anything. We didn’t even have to get a lawyer. All the defenses we had running through our minds didn’t matter. The Lord said, “I got this.”
And this is not about us, because we were terrible at this. We were not good about being still. This is about celebrating what God does. That He cared enough about us to tell us, “I’ve got this. Be still, let me fight this for you.” And He did it way better than we ever could. He is such a kind and good God. He wants to defend His people. He wants to go to bat for you and fight for you. Sometimes you just have to be still enough to let Him do that. We have to learn to let God fight for us.
In your program, we always try to have an action step. And so your action step this week is to pray and ask God, “What is it? Where, in what area, do I need to be still? Do I need to let you fight the battle for me?” Pray about this week.
Then the consequences came. The pillar of cloud left, and the consequences came. Miriam was covered with leprosy, which was just a general term for a skin disease. And in this time and culture, if someone had a skin disease like this, they had to be separated from the community, because they didn’t know about contagion and all of that. And so they had to be set apart. There were whole leper colonies where they would live together, because they couldn’t live in mainstream society. And at this moment, this specific moment, they didn’t know if this was a chronic issue or if this was an acute issue that God would heal quickly. But they were terrified.
Now, some people may ask, why only Miriam? Aaron was there too. Why did only Miriam get this disease? And that’s a great question. But what we kind of glean from this is that her name is actually listed first. In verse 1, it says, “Miriam and Aaron began to talk.” And in ancient writings, the position of names mattered. And so her name coming first implies that she was the one instigating. She was the one kind of starting the conflict and starting the trouble.
But it could also be that Aaron, since he was also participating, even though he was not stricken with leprosy, his sister was, and that meant major ramifications for him. For him to lose his sister, for her to have to leave. And really, God only knew their hearts. Perhaps Miriam’s heart posture was just in a worse place than Aaron’s. And so God decided to punish in this way, to extend the consequences in this way.
But Aaron loved Miriam. And so he asked Moses, “Pray for us. Forgive us. Do not hold this against us. Pray that Miriam would be healed quickly.” And Moses did.
And that is the third thing we learned from Moses: to pray for our enemies. And by enemies, I mean anyone who is in conflict with you in any shape or form. That could be neighbors, it could be coworkers, it could be family, it could be a non-believer, it could be a believer, it could be someone in our church, it could be anybody. But in that moment, when you are in conflict, that person is your enemy, and you are called to pray for them.
Jesus commanded this in Matthew 5. It says, “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” We are called to pray for them to see the truth, and ultimately for their salvation if they are not already believers. But prayer also changes our hearts.
Moses had to go on coexisting with Aaron and Miriam in this journey. They didn’t know this, but they had about thirty-eight and a half more years to go. They had a long journey ahead of them. And so him just harboring bitterness and anger was not going to do anybody any good. So praying for them in this moment changed Moses’ heart. It softened it toward them. And we too are called to pray for those who persecute us and come against us.
I recently heard about a study where people were put in an MRI machine, and they didn’t know if they were in the control group or the study group. In another room, people may or may not have been praying for them. They didn’t know which group they were in. But they found that the people who had someone praying for them in another room had their brains light up. So it was showing that prayer literally changes the brain of the person being prayed for.
Pray for your enemies. It matters. It changes their brain. It changes who they are. It softens your heart toward them.
Ultimately, this whole conflict started because Miriam and Aaron took their eyes off Jesus. They took their eyes off their calling, out of their lane, and put them on anything else: on Moses, on what he was doing, on what he was getting from God.
Sometimes we are in Moses’ position. Sometimes we’re the one who is wronged, who is hurt. We know that we are innocent or that we are speaking truth. But sometimes we’re Miriam and Aaron. Sometimes we’re the ones who are the problem. We’re the ones creating the conflict. We’re the ones who are taking our eyes off Jesus and worrying about everybody else.
But here’s what I want us to catch, and what I want us to hold on to when we are the ones who are creating the conflict: The Lord draws near and invites us closer. God told the siblings to come to the tent of meeting. He said, “Come here.” The pillar of cloud lowered down. He got closer. He didn’t just smite them from a distance. He didn’t simply give them their punishment from on high. He got close. He got down. He drew near.
He didn’t push them away or create more distance because of their sin. He got closer. And then He disciplined, because a good father disciplines His children. Because He loves them and He knows that if they continue in the way they’re going, it will be more painful in the long run.
So, yes, there were consequences. There was a need for correction. And He did that. But He did it within close proximity to them. He allowed the consequences in order to correct their behavior. But then, even after the consequences were administered, He stayed. He allowed Miriam to be healed, but she still had to serve the seven days of ceremonial cleansing before she could be admitted back into the community.
Now, the Israelites knew that when the pillar of cloud or the pillar of fire lifted and started moving, you packed up and you followed. And God could have done that. He could have moved the Israelites within that seven-day period and said, “Miriam, hope you can catch up with us.” But He didn’t. He stayed. It says the people did not move on until she was brought back, until she was restored back to the community.
He will correct. He will allow consequences. He will discipline His children because He loves us, but He will never leave us or forsake us. He is always with us. He wants us to have a close, intimate relationship with Him.
We are going to have conflict in this world. We are a bunch of broken humans doing life with a bunch of other broken humans, even in the church. There will be conflict. But we can decide how we are going to handle that: to operate with humility, to let God fight for us and let Him be our defender, to pray for our enemies, and then to remember that when we are the one who is wrong, the Lord is near. He wants to be close to us.